News Archive - 2004

Here are the most important news items we have published in 2004 on PHP.net.

A Note on Security in PHP

[31-Dec-2004]
The PHP Development Team has issued an important
statement that deals with the security of PHP, and of PHP-based applications.
The trigger for releasing this statement was the growing misconception in the PHP
community regarding recent security problems, which exploited bugs
in PHP applications, rather than bugs in PHP itself. It's a recommended read
for anybody using PHP.

Function list suggestions available

[27-Dec-2004]
Surely, some of our visitors are back at work for a few days between
holidays, and hopefully they will find our post-christmas gift useful.
The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to
be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to
make the result available on all php.net pages.

Whenever you type something into the search field, while having the
function list search option selected, you will get a list of suggested
functions starting with the letters you typed in. You can browse the list
with the up/down keys, and you will be able to autocomplete the function
name with the spacebar.

If you are not interested in this feature, you can turn it
off for yourself on the My PHP.net page.
More information about is available on
the search page.

PHP 4.3.10 & 5.0.3 released!

[15-Dec-2004]
The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of
PHP 4.3.10 and PHP 5.0.3.
These are maintenance releases that in addition to non-critical bug fixes
address several very serious security issues. All Users of PHP are strongly
encouraged to upgrade to one of these releases as soon as possible.

Second Bulgarian PHP Conference

[15-Dec-2004]
The second Web Technology conference in Bulgaria will be held in March 2005
at the city of Sofia. Within its framework, the Second
Bulgarian PHP Conference and first IT Business conference will be held.
The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the new tendencies in this direction
and to popularize the internet technologies in the spheres of business,
education, and services. The range of subjects includes technologies like
PHP, Perl, business systems through web, education through the internet, and
others.

[15-Dec-2004]
The PHP Center and the Software & Support Verlag are pleased
to announce the International
PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The dates for this event will be May 2-4, 2005. The conference venue
is the RAI conference center.

MySQL, RedHat and other partners started a new campaign against software patents

[01-Nov-2004]
In order to boost more awareness of the pending software patent issues in the
European Union—MySQL, ISP 1&1, RedHat and other partners started
a new portal "http://nosoftwarepatents.com".
The site is available in 10 different european languages and explains why
software patents are bad, and how they might affect you. In order to learn
more, or participate in events against software patents, have a look at the
very informative website.

Zend's PHP 5 Coding Contest winners announced

[25-Oct-2004]
Congratulations to Qiang Xue, whose application
'PRADO' earned high votes both
from the public and from the judges' panel!
There are 49 other prizewinning applications in Zend's
contest gallery
– too many to list here. Some of them are ongoing projects, bringing
PHP 5 a small armoury of useful open source tools.

The top 50 applications will remain on display until the end of
this year, giving you the chance to take a leisurely look through
the code and see how the new features in PHP 5 should be used.

PHP before Canadian government, in Ottawa, October 19th and 20th, 2004

[12-Oct-2004]PHP Québec, the profesional association
of PHP users in Québec, will be part of the GTEC exhibition, in Ottawa, Ontario, on
Tuesday October 19th and Wednesday October 20th. PHP Québec will present PHP's
features, its capabilities for e-government and its support services in Canada.
Come and meet us on the floor, booth 1610C.

Forum PHP in Paris, November 18 & 19, 2004

[28-Sep-2004]
The French AFUP association
is proud to announce the fourth annual PHP meeting in Paris,
on November 18th and 19th, 2004. Developers and managers will
gather to meet Zeev Suraski, Rasmus Lerdorf and other prominent community experts
for two days of sessions, packed with
enterprise solutions and advanced techniques
(in French).

PHP 5.0.2 released!

[23-Sep-2004]
The PHP Development Team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.0.2.
This is a maintenance release that in addition to many non-critical bug fixes, addresses a problem
with GPC input processing.
All Users of PHP 5 are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.

PHP 4.3.9 released!

[22-Sep-2004]
The PHP Development Team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.3.9.
This is a maintenance release that in addition to over 50 non-critical bug fixes, addresses a problem
with GPC input processing. This release also re-introduces ability to write
GIF images via the bundled GD extension.
All Users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.

MySQL ComCon Europe

[06-Sep-2004]
The MySQL ComCon Europe 2004 brings together the vigor and excitement of a
community event with the structure of MySQL mission-critical business event.
The conference will take place in Frankfurt from November 9th to 10th and will
have a day of pre-conference power workshops on the 8th. Sessions on diverse
topics such as "Performance Tuning J2EE Applications deployed on MySQL", "PHP
5 and MySQL 4.1/5.0" and a two-part introduction to MySQL Cluster will be
presented by MySQL core developers, expert trainers and MySQL community
leaders. For more details on the event, please visit
http://mysqlcomconeurope.com/.

OSCOM.4 with Apache Track

[14-Aug-2004]
OSCOM, the international association for Open Source Content Management
is arranging the Fourth
Open Source Content Management Conference from 29th September to 1st
October in Zürich. This fall, the event features Apache Software Foundation
projects, and PHP, so you have a chance to meet some prominent
figures of the PHP scene there. OSCOM.4 is a place for developers,
vendors, integrators and users to mingle and learn from each other. Registration is
now open!

New Installation Instructions

[14-Aug-2004]
The latest online version of the PHP Manual contains a completely reorganized
Installation and Configuration part, which is now
divided into sections for individual platforms and servers to ease your first
steps with PHP. The Windows installation instructions are completely
revised, and now suggest you to set environment variables instead of moving
files. This way upgrades and configuration changes become easier.

PHP 5.0.1 Released!

[12-Aug-2004]
The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.0.1.
This is a maintenance release that in addition to many non-critical bug fixes also includes new UNIX and
Windows installation docs which are now auto-generated from the PHP Manual.

PHP Tunisie Magazine

[02-Aug-2004]PHP Tunisie has just released the
second
issue of its monthly french PHP Magazine. In this issue you'll find
a large plan on PostgreSQL, Databases abstractions with PHP, your mini
template engine, an article on images generation with PHP, the migration
towards PHP5 with EasyPHP1.7... And many other articles and latests PHP news.

PHP 5.0.0 Released!

The Zend Engine II
with a new object model and dozens of new features.

XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now
focused around the excellent libxml2 library
(http://www.xmlsoft.org/).

A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as
PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.

A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.

A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later.
This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to
a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL's new features,
such as prepared statements.

SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite,
please visit their website.

Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access
low-level socket operations on streams.

PHP 4.3.8 released!

[13-Jul-2004]
PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.3.8.
This release is made in response to several security issues that have been discovered since the
4.3.7 release. All users of PHP are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 4.3.8 as soon as possible.

International PHP Conference 2004

[18-Jun-2004]
The traditional International PHP Conference 2004 will be taking
place from 7th November to 10th November in Frankfurt (FFM). The
Call for Papers has been issued, so if you have an interesting
talk, the organizers would love to hear about it! You can expect
a gathering of PHP experts and core developers.

The conference is also featuring an OpenSource Exhibition
where PHP related OpenSource projects can present themselves for free.

php|works - early-bird discount now in effect

[16-Jun-2004]php|architect magazine is proud to
introduce php|works 2004, a
three-day conference on PHP and the business of open-source software that
will be held in Toronto, Canada, September 22-24 2004.

The conference includes a total of over 30 hours of technical and
business-oriented presentations that range from Rasmus Lerdorf's "Best
Practices for PHP Developers" to "Getting your OSS Business Funded",
presented by venture capital specialist Christian Mayaud. Other sessions
include practical talks on PHP 5, regular expressions, multilingual
development, PDO, XML and OOP. The business track includes sessions on the
use of PHP in the legal, financial and healthcare industry, growing your
business with OSS, the status of the PHP market and much, much more!

As an added bonus, attendees who sign up before July 20th are
eligible for up to $100 in early-bird savings.

LAMP area at LinuxTag 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany

[14-Jun-2004]
The LAMP area will highlight the use of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP as
technologies for enterprise applications at LinuxTag 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany from June 23
to 26. The companies that are presenting in the speakers area of the 150
square meters booth are: 100days, eZ systems, Mayflower, MySQL
and Zend.

Besides presentations from the above companies the LAMP area also presents
over 40 sessions by Apache-, MySQL- and PHP-developers, such as Rasmus Lerdorf,
Ken Coar and Brian Aker. Entrance to LinuxTag is free if you
pre-register.
For more information see the LAMP Area
website.

PHP 5 Release Candidate 3 Released!

[8-Jun-2004]
The third (and hopefully final) Release Candidate
of PHP 5 is now available! This mostly bug fix release improves PHP 5's
stability and irons out some of the remaining issues before PHP 5 can be
deemed release quality. Everyone is now encouraged to start playing with it!

There are few changes changes since Release Candidate 2, which can be found
here.

Zend's PHP 5 Coding Contest

[06-Jun-2004]Zend's
PHP 5 Coding Contest is underway and accepting submissions.
This is every developer's chance to flaunt their PHP 5 skills
and let their application shine!

Applications will be rated both by your peers and by a panel of
judges assembled from among the most known and well-respected
names in the PHP community.

PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 Released!

[25-Apr-2004]
The second Release Candidate of PHP 5 is now
available! This mostly bug fix release improves PHP 5's stability and irons out
some of the remaining issues before PHP 5 can be deemed release quality. Note
that it is still not recommended for mission-critical use but people are
encouraged to start playing with it and report any problems.

Key changes since Release Candidate 1 include:

The Zend Engine I compatibility mode (zend.ze1_compatibility_mode) has been
re-implemented to more accurately support PHP 4's object auto-clone behavior.

All object-oriented extensions except for MySQLi have moved to studlyCaps.
This includes SQLite, SOAP, Reflection API, Ming and others.

Implementing an interfaces and/or abstract method with the wrong prototype is
now a fatal error. For backwards compatibility, re-implementing regular methods
with the wrong prototype will only result in an E_STRICT warning.

Second PHP Marathon announced

[06-Apr-2004]
DotGeek.org is proud to announce the second
PHP Programming Marathon to be held on the 24 April 2004. Instead of receiving the
problems and composing your solutions offline, it all takes place online and within
a specific timeframe. The Marathon is kindly sponsored by Zend Technologies and will
now feature a problem on PHP 5. Participation is free of charge.

PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 Released!

[18-Mar-2004]
The first Release Candidate of PHP 5 is finally
here! The move from Beta stage to RC stage means that PHP 5 is now feature
complete, and is quite stable - stable enough for everyone to start playing
with. Note that it is still not recommended for mission-critical
use.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

The Zend Engine II
with a new object model and dozens of new features.

XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now
focused around the excellent libxml2 library
(http://www.xmlsoft.org/).

A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later.
This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to
a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL's new features,
such as prepared statements.

SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite,
please visit their website.

A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.

A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as
PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.

Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access
low-level socket operations on streams.

Spanish PHP Mailing List Now at PHP.net

[29-Feb-2004]
The Spanish PHP mailing list was relocated to our list server.
If you would like to subscribe to the list, you can do it via our
mailing lists page. To read
the archives, please see our
news server.

Open Source PHP projects can present themselves, like in
the last years, for free on the Conference at the exhibition area between
the commercial exhibitors. Take your chance and contact
Frank Stepan from
Software & Support.

Conférence PHP Québec 2004 - (Montréal, March 25&26rst, 2004)

[11-Feb-2004]
The PHP Québec Association announces the Conference PHP Québec 2004.
The conference features 20 sessions over 2 days, in English and French.
3 tracks : PHP advanced technics, PHP professionnal and Open Source technologies.
It will take place downtown Montréal, Québec, Canada.

We are currently offering early bird prices.
Students and Small Businesses are eligible for reduced prices.
Buy your tickets early to get rebates and discount with the DVD!

PaWS Tickets Now On Sale!

[05-Feb-2004]
The PaWS Group is proud to announce that
tickets are now available for the first
PHP and Web Standards Conference. We are
offering Weekend tickets (Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd only) as well as Conference
tickets (Friday 20th - Tuesday 24th) for the entire length of the event.
Additionally, we also have Daily tickets available for each day of the conference.
Tickets will also be available on the door for those that simply want to drop in.